The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) is an international opinion tribunal founded in 1979 on the basis of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (Algiers, 1976). Since its establishment, the PPT has served as an independent forum for visibility, testimony, and justice for peoples subjected to severe forms of repression and denial of their fundamental rights to self-determination, dignity, and collective existence, particularly in situations where no competent, accessible, or impartial institutional mechanisms were available.
The PPT mandate was to look at missing and disappeared Indigenous children and unmarked graves, and the forced and coerced sterilisation of Indigenous women, through the lens of international law. The following is from their press release from 31/5/2006
Witnesses spoke of the state-sanctioned forced removal of Indigenous children from their communities and families, to state and church-run Indian Residential Schools, and from there, sometimes without their parents’ knowledge or consent, to other institutions including reformatories, “Indian” hospitals and sanatoria.
Between 4,000 and 6,000 children are known to have died in these institutions, or shortly after leaving them (sometimes running away) in the century and a half up until 1997, when the last institution, Kivalliq Hall in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, closed. The fate or whereabouts of many children who were taken to these institutions and schools remains unknown, although some were known to have been adopted.
Many witnesses, including Dr. Scott Hamilton, said that these numbers are likely to be a gross underestimate, which, without further investigation, remain provisional and incomplete. ‘We don’t know what we don’t know
Of the deaths in the institutions that were recorded, available death certificates indicate that almost half were caused by tuberculosis. We heard that children were underfed and malnourished, subjected to nutritional and medical experiments and forced labour, and lived in cold, insanitary, and overcrowded conditions, rendering them vulnerable to infection.
As one Survivor said, “They didn’t care, that was the thing” (Survivor Audrey Hill).
One particularly harrowing account was of a 4-year-old girl with tuberculosis isolated in a freezing tent on school grounds to die alone, because ‘she’s going to die anyway’. Parents were notified of their child’s death late or sometimes not at all. A state that paid for the transfer to the institutions of an estimated 150,000 children by train, boat and plane across hundreds of kilometres would not pay for dead children to be sent home for burial, or for parents to come to call the children’s spirits home.
Survivors told us of being subjected to harsh discipline, including strappings, solitary confinement for speaking their language or helping other children. One witness, Audrey Hill, described being locked in a dark closet for days with no food or water.
As one witness explained, “it was authoritarian rule over children” (Survivor Robbie Hill).
And as we know, many thousands of children were subjected to sexual assaults by clergy and staff. We heard first-hand testimony from Survivor Leo Nicholas, who said, “They called me Leo the Liar” after disclosing the sexual abuse committed against him to a police officer.
We heard about the State-sanctioned forced sterilisation of Indigenous women, including the testimony of a woman who at 17 years old, was sterilised during childbirth while restrained and in medical distress. Witnesses shared experiences of racism at the hands of medical providers who were told they were unfit to be mothers and should not have any more children. These women were pressured and lied to about the irreversible nature of the procedure. As witness Kahsenniyo Kick stressed, “Motherhood is a sacred responsibility.”
The Tribunal has no difficulty in accepting that this pattern of composite acts constitutes genocide. In international law, genocide need not involve mass killings – it can be a slow and continual process, taking place over centuries.
In Canada, the genocidal acts include the forcible transfer of children from one group to another group; the imposition of measures intended to prevent births in the group; and the infliction of serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group, with the intention to destroy the group as such.
The genocidal intent behind the forced removal of children was explicit: institutions such as Indian Residential Schools were a concrete manifestation of Canada’s colonial policies, expressed in the Indian Act, of elimination of indigeneity, which included denial of Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood; occupation of Indigenous lands; and erasure of Indigenous legal orders, languages and cultures.
The atrocities visited on the bodies and spirits of children in the schools, on young women in the hospitals; the thousands of known deaths of children in segregated hospitals, in the schools, the unmarked graves and the ashes of babies in furnaces – are the physical manifestation of a genocidal colonialism which, above all, valued, coveted and seized Indigenous lands, territories and resources.
More information at PPT Preliminary Statement: 57th Session on Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Graves in Canada – Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal | Tribunale permanente dei popoli
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